ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Roger Dean versus James Cameron

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Roger Dean versus James Cameron

Avatar may have been his "most personal film to date" (as he says) but part of that may well have been having very personal connections in the early seventies to the Yes album art of Roger Dean, who is now suing for copyright infringement. How hard would it have been to get Dean involved from the start in any case?

This is the art from the cover of An Evening of Yes Music Plus for instance. Erm...

And the whole theme of a fragile planet. One assumes he dug Olias of Sunhillow, Jon Anderson's solo album based on Dean's paintings. For heaven's sake.

Roger I'll be happy to testify mate if you are reading this. Thank you Gerry Canavan for this. Fairly shortly my essay on Avatar will be published (thanks again Gerry) in which the resemblance (more than that even) is noted. And there's this.

2 comments:

Bill Benzon said...: Well, then there's Hayao Miyazaki, whose Castle in the Sky does the flying worlds thing and whose Princess Mononoke does the glowing sacred world thing.; July 11, 2013 at 10:29 AM
Henry Warwick said...: So, like _FOUR YEARS AGO_ I wrote an article on how James Cameron's "Avatar" basically copped a lot of its vision from Roger Dean's album cover art from the early 1970s (as well as a big fat blast from Myazaki's films and the film Silent Running). You can read my article here:
http://henrywarwick.com/blog/2009/12/31/avatar/
Well, GUESS WHAT? Last week Roger Dean sued James Cameron for, well, basically ***everything I pointed out four years ago.***
What I wanna know is:
1. What the hell took Roger Dean so freakin' long to puzzle that out? and
2. Since when is a painting style or an approach to imagery property? Sigh.
Braque should have sued Picasso. Duchamp should have sued Picasso. Everyone should have sued Picasso.
Cameron obviously copped a huge chunk of Dean's imagination from early Yes albums (maybe while doing bong hits back in University while listening to Demons & Wizards by Uriah Heep, or maybe Fragile by Yes) so who knows where this lawsuit by Dean will go. Four years ago. I feel like a PROPHET!!!
:-); July 11, 2013 at 9:06 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Roger Dean versus James Cameron

2 comments:

Counter

ShareThis